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Life’s Crossroads

July 22, 2008

Life is a continuous journey, and a journey would mean we have to follow the roads that will lead us to our destination. The roads however, are not always smooth and straight, some are rough, bumpy, and crooked. We may even encounter detours, dead ends, and crossroads or intersections.

Likewise, as we journey through life, we constantly go through smooth and rough times, ups and downs, twists and turns, etc.. And most often we also encounter several crossroads along the way where we have to choose among different paths. Life in short is just like a road.

The picture depicts a man standing at the center of the crossroad, pretty undecided on which path he should follow. Many times, I came across big and small  crossroads in my life where I wasn’t so sure of which way to take. There were two options which I thought I can do, first is to think  quick and decide which path I thought is the right one, and second is to do nothing at all…I just wait and let fate decide for me.

If we ask ourselves this question, which of the two would you choose? This reminded me of the txt message forwarded to me last night that has something to do with giving up and making choices. It was a quote from Captain Jack Sparrow  of the movie Pirates of the Carribean …“Sometimes, fate has a cruel way of putting things together. Maybe it’s better if people just give up when there’s no point in fighting for something anymore. When the ship has finally sailed, only a fool would go after it when it’s already miles away. But sometimes it’s a lot better to be a fool to go after what we want and need, rather than to regret everything in the end because we never even tried…” The decision is ours to make should we decide to pursue what really wanted no matter how impossible it seemed or we just wait and do nothing, and later on saying…”if only…I did this… and that”… “Life is a matter of making choices“. 

Here’s another inspiring quote from Paulo Coelho. The quote rather speaks clearly for itself.

Everything tells me that
I am about to make a wrong decision,
but making mistakes is just part of life.
What does the world want of me?
Does it want me to take no risks,
to go back to where I came from because
I didn’t have the courage to say “yes” to life?

Taking the risk is having the courage to say “yes” to life says P. Coelho, and it’s definitely better than doing nothing at all. Then again the decision to do something will place us in another difficult situation…Question is… Which path should we follow then? or what should we do then? given that several options were there for us to choose from. So we make up our mind and decide…take the risk. There are no guarantees that the path we decided to follow will lead us to happiness or success, but there is no other way in knowing what it will lead us until we take it. 

The decision making part is the toughest part though. We should take time to think and weigh our options first and not rush on things, we listen to our hearts, and follow our instincts.  Dilly dallying I’m afraid is another matter, and it’s very common, that I admit is one of my weak points. We were so fond of saying “later“, “I can’t decide right now“, “I still have a lot of time anyway“, and so on…until we realize later that so much time had been wasted. After carefully evaluating the situation, we now make our decision…and get prepared for possible ramifications. If the outcomes are good then we know that we made the correct decision. But if our decision proved to be wrong, then we look at the positive side of it, we certainly didn’t arrive there without learning a thing or two, right?

Those crossroads in my life taught me hard lessons, lessons that I wouldn’t have learned any other way. Time and again I made the wrong choices and decisions, to which these musings only made me realize that I should’t regret them. I made those choices because I thought they were the right thing to do…at that time, and for a time I was even happy with those decisions. The long-term consequences were not what i longed for but nevertheless, those experiences taught me to be stronger and wiser in dealing with more life’s crossroads as I continue with my journey.

Posted by dumanay at 11:08 am | permalink

Previous Comments

ayyiiiii… I like this blog of yours ate dumz… reminds me of the poem invictus… yeah we are the architecture of our future… we learn from things…

Posted by janice at July 23, 2008, 8:40 pm

yes cuz! sad thing is sometimes we sooo lack that driving force and conviction that it’s taking us toooooo long to move…

Posted by dumanay at July 24, 2008, 9:05 am

I really like your blog!

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